


Rage

by Comatosejoy



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, The Iliad - Homer, The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe-Dark Academia, Dark Academia, Sexual Assault, what happened to thetis is not easily sugar-coated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:54:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27363841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Comatosejoy/pseuds/Comatosejoy
Summary: Rage!--Sing, Goddess.Achilles, mad with grief, works to solve the mystery of Patroclus's murder.
Relationships: Achilles/Patroclus of Opus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 84
Kudos: 105





	1. Chapter 1

** i. **

It has been months since the incident happened and I have been enraged every second going forward. My anger has manifested in a sort of mania and everyone (and I mean everyone) around me has suffered as a result. And I do not care. In my worst moments, I think about seagulls and hungry, stray dogs tearing apart the flesh of all these rich schoolboys. I think perhaps that is too good a fate for whoever did this to Patroclus. When I find his murderer--I know he did not slip--he will wish it was seagulls plucking his flesh from bones. I will unhinge my jaw and swallow his heart whole; I will peel his skin, coat myself in his blood, watch the life fade from his eyes, and it will still not be enough. By the time I am done, they will have to use a magnifying glass to find my last shreds of humanity. The best of me died with him. The rest will soon follow, I think.

** ii. **

Some days I wonder if I was always this flawed. Surely, _surely_ I was not. Perhaps the flaws lay dormant--Patroclus’s death the lit match tossed atop so much kindling. Perhaps I underwent a transformation when he died. Perhaps this, perhaps that.

When I really look at myself, I realize the only difference is that Patroclus had given me a sense of shame. Of course I wouldn’t tell Mr. Phoenix to fuck off--even though I badly wanted to when he caught me red-handed stealing Lucky Strikes from the pack he kept in his desk drawer--Patroclus would be disappointed if I did. Of course I didn’t tell everyone that Deidamia was a snot-nosed, lying little bitch and I never slept with her. Patroclus knew the truth, and that’s all that mattered. And of course I didn’t use my family’s wealth, or who my dad was, or who my mom was for that matter, for my personal gain. I couldn’t even imagine the look Patroclus would have given me if I’d used the same line favored by Agamemnon: _do you know who my father is?_

I suppose it’s obvious, but passion and rage are two sides of the same coin. In that regard, I sometimes wonder what Patroclus felt for me. My love burned, consumed, hurt. But he seemed to love me like a balm on that burn. I could not imagine him going mad, as I have gone mad, in the event of my death. What would he have done? And yet I’m convinced he loved me more than I did him. He had a talent for love, a talent for forgiveness and gentleness and grace. In many ways, he was my antithesis. 

That’s what I thought (albeit less kindly and less articulately) when he first came into my life. I was twelve and quite cruel--the sort of kid who fried ants in the driveway and asked timid girls out at school as a joke--when Patroclus came to stay at our house. 

My father--fiftysomething when I was born--was an old man. Once a famous movie actor, he now used his royalty checks to support various charities and take on philanthropic endeavors. Such an endeavor was Patroclus. I could sense, even as a boy, that the adults were leaving things out. The official story was that his mother had come down with some sort of mystery illness and his father--an old theater buddy of my dad’s--needed to devote his full attention to tending to her. This was, of course, not true by any stretch of the imagination. At the time, though I knew I was being lied to, I did not care. 

It is only in retrospect that I find him lovely--pouty, red lips, long eyelashes, skin dark like baked clay and freckled still, huge, brown eyes and loose, dark curls. At the time, I just saw a boy. My father was out of town when he arrived. Only Mr. Phoenix and the house staff were there to watch me, and my father had given me the responsibility of greeting him. 

Little asshole that I was, I practiced my violin (a Stradivarius my father had gifted me a few days prior--I learned later that it had belonged to Patroclus’s mother) while waiting for him, and did not stop my piece when he arrived. I arched an eyebrow at him when I was done. What a picture I must have made--still in my school uniform (why hadn’t I changed out of it?), couldn’t bother to lower the instrument which by rights belonged to him as I greeted him, mean look in my eye. 

He said nothing. I got the distinct feeling that he was not at all impressed with me. 

“I’m Achilles Pelides,” I said, breaking the silence.

“Patroclus,” he said. 

“No last name?” I asked coolly. I knew it, of course. My father had said, Patroclus Menoetides is coming to stay with us. You’ll be a good boy, won’t you? 

I had decided I wouldn’t. 

“No last name,” he affirmed. 

“Well, dinner will be at seven. If you don’t mind--” I said, looking down at my sheet music. 

Patroclus was enrolled at my school for our seventh year--a private institution that my father had donated over $1 million to--but we did not speak much at first. I was popular and he was not. Boys crowded around me and girls sighed over me. 

We were a month into the term when I got called to the principal’s office. A few days prior, I’d orchestrated a savage “prank” which showcased both my impressive leadership skills and what a twisted little psychopath I was: I had managed to convince all the boys in my gym class to gang up on one particular boy. I don’t remember what offense this boy had committed to deserve this, but I continued to escalate things, and before I knew it, the boy had sustained a concussion in the locker room and (and I’d hoped the boy would be too embarrassed to admit this part) we’d joked that we should shove a stick of deodorant up his ass before one boy stopped us by calling it “too gay.”

But, as it turned out, the principal had not wanted to talk about me. In fact, no one ever sought to punish me over the whole affair. Whether it was because of my father’s steady donations or because bullies tend to win in the end, I do not know. What the principal had wanted to talk about was Patroclus’s apparent truancy. In those days, I did not share any classes with him, and this was news to me. 

“I was hoping you could say something encouraging to him before I have to get your father involved,” the principal had said to me, and I set out to do something of the sort. 

I found him, eventually, behind the bleachers. “Heard you haven’t been to any of your classes,” I said by way of greeting. 

“Yeah, well,” he answered. Something about the way he spoke to me, brushed me off easily, drove me crazy. He was smaller than me back then, but he squared his shoulders and looked me in the eye. 

“You’re going to get in trouble if you just hide here all day,” I said. 

“Just get your dad to write a check,” he answered. 

The bell rang. “Come with me to class. We could get your schedule switched around so you’re with me,” I said, fully aware that I sounded pathetic and desperate. 

“Or what? You’ll shove Old Spice up my ass?” he drawled, and I did not miss the hostile look in his eye. 

I could feel my cheeks redden. Of course it was all anyone could talk about, and of course Patroclus had heard about it. None of that was surprising. What _was_ surprising was that I felt bad about it. Oh sure, on the way over to the principal’s I’d been working up some crocodile tears and prepared a litany of excuses, but I hadn’t meant any of it. 

Here, alone in the bleachers in front of the first boy to ever show me contempt, I could have died of shame. 

“Come on,” I choked out, grabbing his wrist and pulling him to class.

** iii. **

I suppose I should have realized that Patroclus had not been hiding simply out of disinterest in his studies. I noticed bruises on his arms, his hair disheveled. I’d reach for his shoulder or his wrist and find him flinching away from it as if I had meant to hit him.

It wasn’t a secret that the school had a bullying problem--rich, entitled boys will be rich, entitled boys, after all. It was just unusual that I wasn’t at the helm of it. I suppose I could have made it obvious that Patroclus was off-limits from the start, but it hadn’t occurred to me. Initially, I had foolishly thought that his defiant stare affected the other boys just as it had me. But I thought wrong. 

It took me embarrassingly long to connect the dots. There were times I almost noticed, like when Patroclus took the hairdryer (left long ago by one of my father’s romantic conquests) to his bedroom while sneakily laundering his backpack late at night when the household had gone to sleep, his books smelling vaguely of ammonia the next morning. Two of the boys, I learned much, much later, had taken turns pissing in his backpack while a third boy distracted him.

It wasn’t until someone fucked with him in front of me that I was snapped out of whatever oblivious daze I’d been in.

I was speaking to Patroclus, leaning on the wall across the hall while Pat was searching through his locker. I was hidden by a column, casually looking through my flip-phone. The final bell had rung. The hall was empty. 

“You know, the problem with Deidamia is that she wants everyone to think she’s the smartest person in the room,” I said, playing Snake on the phone, ignoring several text messages. “Someone mentioned _Twilight_ and she made this huge show of being all--” I used a high-pitched Valley girl voice for this next part--“ _I would never read something so puerile._ She said that--puerile. I had to fucking Google what it meant. Yesterday, she tried to talk to me about _The Old Man and the Sea_. She told me she liked Hemmingway’s sparse style. She’s pretentious.” 

He laughed, which I loved. “ _You’re_ pretentious. That’s not the problem.”

“What is the problem?” 

“You don’t like her as a person,” he said, still shuffling through his belongings. 

I heard heavy steps but didn’t bother to look up from my game until I heard an angry slam. Patroclus, clearly dazed, leaned further into his locker as the door swung back and forth. I saw Ajax, walking towards the bathroom casually as though nothing happened. 

“Ajax?” I said, and his back stiffened. Ajax was an ugly, brutish boy with a snub nose and very little intelligence.

“Achilles,” he said, turning around, overly-friendly. “Didn’t see you there, buddy.” 

I had been a violent kid with a penchant for sadism so sophisticated that I sometimes thought teachers admired it at least a little under their scolding. That makes sense, in retrospect, since bullies who stay bullies into adulthood seem to have three career paths: teachers, nurses, and cops. This sophistication evaporated into thin air and I saw red. I tasted the rage in my mouth, felt it tearing away at my insides, pressurizing inside my skull. It was all-consuming, terrible, and, perversely, it was pleasurable, too. I threw myself on top of Ajax. I gave myself over to rage and in exchange, I became a god; my fists could not miss, punches that Ajax landed did not hurt. I was laughing, and, though at that point in my life I’d never been drunk, I realize now that that is what I felt. I was drunk with violence, and, like an alcoholic, could not be sated. 

When a teacher finally pulled me off of Ajax, it was like breaching the surface of the ocean after being underwater for a very long time. Though I know all three of us were paraded before the principal, I only remember looking at my hands, not so damaged as you’d think if you saw Ajax’s face, and then glancing at Patroclus who looked shell-shocked, the unlikely catalyst that set me off.

** iv. **

I did not let him out of my sight much after that. Whatever problem I’d had with the boy in gym class had been entirely forgotten, and Ajax avoided me like the plague. I could not bear the thought of Patroclus looking at me with such contempt nor such horrified disbelief ever again, so I behaved myself.

Or at least, I tried. My insensitivity to anyone but Patroclus could border on the cruel, and that was readily apparent by the time the spring dance rolled around. It had not yet been decided whether my father was going to ship me--and only me, my father made it clear that one tuition was all he cared to pay for--off to boarding school in the fall and, as a result, some of the girls made weepy confessions of love which embarrassed me on my good days and annoyed me on the bad ones. 

“Are you going to the spring dance?” one girl in particular asked before science class. 

“No,” I answered, examining my nail bed, bored with the conversation before it even began. 

“Why not?” she asked. 

I disdained the idea of being around so many people, for one thing. I would have to dance with girls, whom I also disdained. And here’s where my stomach got twisted up and things were a little confusing: I did not want to watch Patroclus dancing with any girls, either. 

“Doesn’t interest me,” I said. 

“Well, if you change your mind, I’ll save a dance for you,” the girl replied, and went back to her own desk. 

“I think she was trying to ask you to go with her,” Patroclus, next to me, whispered into my ear. My entire body jolted at his nearness, and I said nothing. 

After class, he followed close behind me. “Why didn’t you want to go with her? She’s pretty.” 

“Oh? Maybe you should ask her instead,” I nearly snarled. 

“That’s not what I was getting at,” he said. “I’m just saying… you shouldn’t feel like you have to turn down girls just because no one is asking _me_ to go with them.” 

I don’t know what came over me, but I shoved him into the wall of lockers beside us. Pinned against the wall by my arms and just an inch or two away, his large eyes grew somehow wider. I almost closed the gap between us. I was dangerously close to his mouth and felt his breath, hot and sweet-smelling, against my face. “I don’t want to talk about girls,” I said, my voice coming out low and gravelly. 

He nodded and stammered, “A-alright.”

** v. **

If you asked my father, my mother was a seductress of the most devastating sort. She knew exactly what she was doing, getting pregnant with me, and damn near ruined his life in the process.

I was not a particularly smart child, but I wasn’t an idiot, either. My mother was twenty-seven when I was twelve, and by God, that expensive private school had at least taught me subtraction. 

I pieced the story together much later, and my mother had confirmed it when I’d finally gotten the courage to ask. My mother was from a much richer, more famous family than my father. Her lineage was East Coast money, the kind that has Chippendale in their sitting room and Mulberry silk in their closet and can trace their ancestors to the protestants who settled in New England, but my father, the lowly action hero whose net worth was only in the low millions, had something on my maternal grandfather--a bargaining chip, blackmail, whathaveyou. So my grandfather offered a night with his daughter for his silence. 

My mother was a ferocious bitch. I say that with admiration--I inherited that ferocity from her. She put up a fight, clawing the fuck out of him and biting a chunk out of his shoulder. He had told me and anyone else who asked that the scar above his clavicle was from a motorcycle accident shortly before I was born. But, upon close examination, the teeth marks were unmistakable. He knocked her out and fucked her anyway, probably more out of anger than anything. This according to my mother, who woke up the next morning bruised and unsure what to do. She had not spared me the details, including how she spent a week at the Hotel Bel-Air after the incident, notably catching the X-Files premiere on television, which she stared at without comprehension, and refusing to look in the mirror. 

“The worst part,” she’d said, and I think she took a little pleasure in watching me detest my father, “was that when his shoulder healed two months later, he’d gotten barbiturates fed to me and had another round. That’s when you were conceived.” 

All famous families have stories like this. Most sweep it under the rug. Think Rosemary Kennedy. But my mother was born too late to be lobotomized, not that she cared what they did to her. She managed to keep her pregnancy and my birth a secret (a coordinated effort of several wronged women living vicariously through my mother) and sold the story, complete with a corroborating DNA test scrounged from one of my father’s cigarette butts, to the _New York Times_. 

My father’s law team and publicists responded in the typical way: “Mr. Pelides believed the accuser to be eighteen at the time of the interaction” and “Mr. Pelides remains firm that the incident was consensual.” My mother did not tell me this part, but it came up on the first page when I Googled myself at school. Interestingly, it did not come up when I did the same at home. I only later realized my father had put some sort of child locks on our internet. 

My father was given guardianship over me with consent from my mother’s legal guardian at the time, as she was still a minor. Keep in mind, this was only three years after Clarence Thomas had been nominated for the supreme court nomination and we all know how well that went for Anita Hill. Only a few years after my birth, Monica Lewinsky, a fresh-out-of-college unpaid intern, was tricked into believing that the most powerful man in the world was in love with her and ridiculed nearly to death for it. It’s shocking that worse didn’t happen to my mother, is what I’m saying. 

I cannot explain to you how I reconciled the father who adored me with the man I know tortured my mother. I certainly could not do it as I aged and discovered more of the truth. Sometimes I wonder how I reconcile the vicious bully I was with the boy who was loved by the best man to ever live. I suppose saying that I didn’t know is no excuse, because I knew enough. Nor is my reasoning that very few of us have innocent fathers satisfactory. I would have done a lot of things differently, in retrospect. 

My mother came to visit me just as Patroclus was becoming Mine in a way that I recognized as crossing several boundaries. We were closer than friends, certainly closer than siblings. Two months before, I’d asked if we could share a room. 

“It’ll be like a sleepover every night,” I’d reasoned, and I’d watched conflict roll through his eyes. I could guess several reasons for this: Patroclus seemed to like being alone. We were at the age where we were boys first discovered jacking off, and doing so is difficult if there’s always someone in the same room. I could be moody and difficult to read. And there was something else, too: one day in late winter, we’d been roughhousing in the woods around my father’s estate. Swinging from a tree, Patroclus had grabbed me around my midsection and pulled me to the ground. The wind was knocked out of both of us, and, breathless, somehow there was no distance between our mouths. My stomach lurched. My skin pricked. My heart raced. I felt my cheeks, already flushed with the cold, grow even redder. I did not move, nor did he, and I did not know if this was an accident or not. And then I was on my feet, thinking about all those stupid love confessions from girls I’d been on the receiving end of and knowing I must look exactly like they had--flushed, embarrassed. Swooning. I was swooning. It was enough to make me sprint as fast as I could away from the scene. I avoided him for the rest of the day and we had not talked about it since.

But the conflict passed like storm clouds rolling over the sky but not breaking, and Patroclus had repeated my words in agreement: “Like a sleepover every night.” 

Presently, my mother was taking me out to get frozen yogurt in a sporty, vintage convertible. I had only met her a few times in my life before this, and that was when I was too little to really remember. She was young enough that she knew what I was into; she’d dated a guy who worked on a few Disney shows popular with girls--“He’d give you a tour of the studios if you want, introduce you to some of the stars.” She knew about some of the video games I played: Fallout and Diablo (of the latter she said, ”I prefer to play as the witch doctor,” and I thought she was the coolest person alive). 

“This place wasn’t self-serve when I was a girl,” she said when we arrived at the shop, located in a shitty little strip mall, and I carelessly piled my yogurt to towering heights. She didn’t stop me, as adults usually did, when I poured toppings onto the pint-sized cup like a mad scientist. 

The cashier raised an eyebrow as I placed the exceedingly heavy thing on the scale. “Your total is $55.37,” she said. 

I expected my mother to complain. I was a shitheel, and, despite the fact that she’d impressed me, I was still trying to see what I could get away with. But she didn’t even blink as she handed her card over.

“I do not like this,” I said, tasting the monstrosity when I sat down. Again, this was to test her limits. Children will eat anything sugary you put in front of them, after all. 

“Get something you do like,” she said, tossing me her credit card. 

I smiled devilishly at her and strode out the door of the shop. Her mouth quirked up, amused, but she did not follow me. 

In those days, pet stores--the kind where you could buy kittens and puppies, not the ones where you can just get gerbils and goldfish--were more common. In the sad little strip mall, there was such a store called Pet’s! (apostrophe and exclamation point, both). I stood for a moment, staring at the glass boxes holding the dogs, trying to decide between the handsome golden retriever and the brindle mastiff before I realized that I did not have to decide. 

“I’ll take these two,” I said, pointing at one then the other. 

“I’m sure you will,” chuckled the teenager working there. “Is your mommy or daddy around? We can’t make sales to minors.” 

I rolled my eyes and walked out. My mother, having finished her yogurt (or maybe having tossed it in the trash the second I was out of sight) was leaning against her car and smoking a Gauloise. She looked like a model--stylishly dressed, all bent angles, sleek and beautiful and terrible. 

“Mother!” I shouted at her. 

She did not look at me, but stubbed out her cigarette and began walking in my direction. I half-expected her to drag me away from the pet shop, but she ducked under the door (6’1 and wearing heels), and said, “What seems to be the problem?” 

“I want the retriever and the mastiff, but it seems I need your signature,” I said. Something interesting happened, then. My mother and I seemed to read each other’s thoughts. We were like starving wolves circling a fat cow, and our viciousness was intoxicating to me. This connection was inexplicable. It felt like it was always there, and yet I barely knew my mother before. 

“Is that all?” she said casually, and I laughed. 

“W-we need your driver’s license, ma’am,” the teenager, who seemed equal parts scared and entranced by my mother, stammered. 

She walked to the counter and slapped her ID on the counter. Her voice was melodic as she said, “Now, what did my boy want?”

“These two,” I said, pointing to the pups. 

“Are you sure? I quite like this little one,” she said, running her manicured finger over the glass in front of a tiny Maltese’s cage. 

“So get him,” I said, not interested in something so tiny, so shivery, with its disgusting eye stains and its yappy little mouth. 

“I shall,” she said. “Why don’t you go pick out some toys and things for your new friends, Achilles?” 

I went and gathered every dog treat, leash, collar, and dog toy in the store, as well as one of every dog bed. I brought them to the front in heaps in my arms. 

“Covering all your bases. Smart,” she said, nodding at the pile of mostly useless shit I’d put on the counter. 

Returns at Pet’s! were not accepted, and we sped around with three puppies walking back and forth between our laps and $2,000 worth of shit in the backseat. 

“We could take them to a park,” my mother said. 

“Can we get Patroclus first? He’d love this,” I said. 

“But of course,” my mother said. Her mood shifted, though, as she drove recklessly back to my father’s estate.

My father was home and gaped at the sight of my arms full with two squirming puppies. 

“Is there a more lovely sight than a boy with a dog?” my mother said poisonously to him, leaning against the door frame as I raced to find Patroclus. 

“You just made the decision for my household to have two dogs?” my father asked, his acting skills not quite good enough to cover up his annoyance. I did not worry about my father rehoming the dogs. He wanted to be the good guy. He wanted my mother to be the villain. 

“You dislike unilateral decisions made on your behalf without your consent?” I heard her ask innocently. I did not hear the rest of the conversation.

** vi. **

“Your mother does not like Patroclus,” my father said to me two days later.

“Oh?” I asked. In fact, this was not news to me. She had been that wolf I’d so admired at Pet’s! the rest of her visit and Patroclus was like a trembling lamb watching her close in on him. 

But I did not understand just how nuanced my mother’s feelings truly were. My mother hated my father, and by extension, my father’s associates, and my father’s associates’s children. However, when Patroclus died, it was not my father who dropped everything and flew to the east coast, it was my mother. Though it is difficult for me to remember entirely--those first few days before they found his body were frantic, and then, when I was too exhausted for franticness, they were confusing--I don’t think my father even called me. And he certainly didn’t fork over any money when I’d had the idea to offer a reward for information or when I wanted to hire a PI to do some investigating where I thought the police were lacking. That, too, was all my mother. I try to keep that in mind when I think about how she behaved when Patroclus was alive. Because my mother loved me, and by extension, she loved who I loved. And I loved Patroclus. 

“She arranged that you spend your summers under the tutelage of Dr. Chiron. You’ve heard of him?” 

I had. He’d written a best-seller the year before which had something to do with childhood trauma or sustainability or divorce or whatever had been trendy to write about that year and I’d seen him on a couple of talk shows promoting it. What I couldn’t figure out was if he was a doctor like how my pediatrician was a doctor or if he was a doctor like how Dr. Phil was a doctor. 

“Yes,” I answered, uncomfortable with his line of questioning and suddenly panicked that I’d never see Patroclus again. 

He took a healthy sip of his whiskey. We were in his study, just the two of us, and he spent some time looking over a few papers on his desk before he continued. 

“What your mother doesn’t realize,” he said, a twinge of malice in his voice, “is that Dr. Chiron and I have the same publisher. Remember the memoir I wrote last year?” 

Saying that my father wrote a memoir would be like saying Milli Vanilli had sung their own songs. What had actually happened was that my father had drank a lot of whiskey (and, I suspected, did drugs of the powdered variety that go up your nose) and told his life story to some poor woman who’d just graduated from a liberal arts college with a degree in English. This woman, bless her, tried to sift through the cocaethylene-infused exaggerations and managed to ghost-write a coherent story. 

“I remember,” I said. 

“She thinks she’s only sending one boy to Dr. Chiron, but I’ve arranged for two.” 

Relief flooded through me. I did not care that my father was using Patroclus as a tool to annoy my mother. In fact, something occurred to me. 

“And have you given any thought to Ilion Academy?” I asked. My impending shipment off to boarding school had been hanging over my head, and I’d been dreading it. 

I watched his brows knit. Perhaps there is a time when every young person thinks they’re cleverer than their parents. In the case of my father, I often think I was. 

“How do you mean?” he asked. 

“Well, why stop at just the summer?” I asked casually. “She doesn’t want Patroclus to go to Ilion, and the $55,000 extra per year is just a drop in the bucket. Bet he could even get a scholarship with his grades.” 

He beamed. “You might be onto something, son.”


	2. Chapter 2

** i. **

The Thursday Patroclus went missing, I woke up in our bed alone. I was not alarmed--just the opposite, actually. I’d spent the previous afternoon conditioning in the gymnasium for the upcoming track season, and though Patroclus and I usually jogged together in the early morning, it struck me as sweet that he had let me sleep in and rest my muscles.

I had rolled over contentedly to his side of the bed (we had pushed the two twin-sized mattresses in our dorm together, and so such rolling was possible), and buried my face in his pillow, still a little warm and smelling of him, completely unaware that this was the last time I would wake up happy. 

His phone was on the nightstand, alight with two text messages from Briseis, which I rolled my eyes at. It was not unusual that he mistakenly left his phone behind--something I found endearing when we were together and annoying when we were apart--so I plugged it back into the charger so it’d at least have a full battery when he came back to our room and went about getting ready for class. 

It had been sleeting heavily the previous day, and, without stopping at the dining hall for breakfast, I trudged through the slick mud to my first period. I didn’t share a class with him until our third period, Anatomy & Physiology, which he had chosen to take because of his general interest in medicine and I had chosen to take because we got to dissect a cat. 

It occurs to me now that Patroclus was still alive at this point. He did not die right away. This is something my mind keeps circling: he was alive for a full day after his fall. His body showed signs of hypothermia. That’s the worst part, that it was not quick or painless. On the rare occasion that I am able to sleep, I have recurring nightmares of Patroclus at the bottom of that ravine, his leg broken, concussed, calling out for me as the frost creeps in.

Something I cannot figure out, though: he had not taken his jacket, despite the temperature being only slightly above freezing. He’d had only a thin hoodie on--nothing that would keep out the chill. Pointing this out to a police officer seemed unworthy of my time, however, as the police showed contempt for us rich Ilion boys, indifference towards Patroclus’s “accidental” death, and total incompetence everywhere else. 

I arrived in the classroom early and watched the door from my seat, waiting eagerly for him. I had something funny to tell him, or gossip I thought he’d find interesting, or something that seemed very important at the time which I forget now. 

When Briseis walked through the door, she made a beeline for me. This was startling to me, as we both took great pains to pretend that the other did not exist. 

“Where is Patroclus? He isn’t answering my texts,” she hissed. I had a mean comment queued up about how boys don’t like it when girls act desperate, which was sexist enough to really get under her skin and make her seethe and also implied (quite correctly, in my opinion) that she had a romantic interest in him. But before I could get it out, she added, “And he wasn’t in Brit Lit.” 

This caught me off-guard. My quip was forgotten. “He wasn’t in Brit Lit?” 

The look on my face must have told her all she needed to know, because she said, “Oh, my God.” 

I stood. It wouldn’t be insane to think that maybe he fell back asleep after his jog and skipped his morning classes. That would account for him not answering his phone. The teacher had not come in yet, so ditching class wasn’t as tough as it might have been, and I raced across campus to the dorms with Briseis on my heels, expecting to find Patroclus rumpled in bed, adorably snoring, and perfectly well.

Girls were not allowed in the boys’ dormitories and vice versa, not that that ever stopped anyone, but I pointedly did not let Briseis in as I unlocked the building’s front door and she did her best not to look extremely annoyed at me as she shifted her weight in the cold. 

“He isn’t in our room,” I said when I returned. I heard how dumbstruck I sounded. “His uniform is still hanging up.” 

“You didn’t leave for class at the same time?” Briseis asked, arching her brow critically at me. 

I didn’t care for her tone and, equally as bitchily, said, “We go jogging in the morning. He didn’t wake me and went alone today because I had track stuff yesterday.” I then held up his phone, which I had retrieved from its charger. And, because I couldn’t resist and I still did not think anything serious had happened, I touched the button on the side to light up the lockscreen said, “Eleven texts. It’s not even noon, Briseis.” 

“I have a bad feeling,” she said, biting her lip. The fact that she did not return my snark gave this “bad feeling,” a notion I would have normally scoffed at, a strange sense of verisimilitude. I was suddenly very worried. Dread, cold and unfamiliar, slithered through my belly. “What is your jogging route? I’ll start there.” 

The jogging paths Patroclus and I would take were not a set thing; we changed them daily. There were a dozen possible routes he could have taken on the mountain trails behind the school, all of which also had bifurcations of their own. We had explored off-trail, too, deep into the woods in the five years we had attended Ilion, Patroclus pointing out plants he could identify while I followed. 

“Squirrel corn,” he had said last spring, when we had decided it was warm enough to camp in the woods over the weekend, pointing at a group of oddly-shaped white flowers that reminded me a bit of bleeding hearts. 

“That is _not_ what it’s called,” I said. 

“Swear to god. People often mistake them for another plant called Dutchman's breeches.” 

“You’re fucking with me,” I said. 

“And over here we have clown’s wig.” He gestured in the direction of another group of flowers. I was incredulous but not familiar enough with the flora native to New England to argue, and the look on my face made Patroclus bark a full-bodied laugh. “Okay, I made that last one up.” 

“You’re so mean to me,” I had replied, pouting in a very undignified way--something I would only do in front of Patroclus. It says a lot, I think, about his ability to love that I felt so comfortable being myself, warts and all, around him. When I was petulant, he’d sweetly tease me until my sulky mood appeared ridiculous to even myself. When I was cruel, he’d bring me back to step with just one look. And when I did something good or even halfway decent, he’d beam at me so radiantly that I’d melt under his gaze. He made me better, is what I’m saying, and without him, I have no reason not to destroy everyone and everything in my path. 

The realization that Patroclus was likely hurt sent me to the trails. My wingtips sunk into the mud at the base of one of the trailheads, the button-down and blazer of my uniform soaked through with nervous sweat. I’d almost forgotten Briseis was next to me, struggling to keep up, her own uniform just as ruined as mine, and she finally said, “It’s getting late, we need to tell a teacher. Maybe he’s back at the dorms. You shouldn’t have taken his phone, you know. He’ll have no way of contacting us!” 

“Fine, go back,” I snapped, more vicious than I’d ever been with her, though not for lack of wanting. Her affection for Patroclus had made me jealous to a point of absolute hatred when we were younger that had only lessened over time because I (unbeknownst to her) had made my move first and, in essence, won the rivalry she had not known she was participating in. But now that Patroclus was nowhere in sight to remind me to be civil and with Briseis--short, pretty, yappy, like a Yorkshire terrier I wouldn’t mind snapping the neck of--exacerbating my stress, it took considerable willpower not to scream at her.

** ii. **

Dr. Chiron did not give the outward appearance of wealth nor intellect. Looking at him, you’d think he was a bodybuilder or some mobster’s muscle. He wasn’t an attractive man--a scar ran through his eyebrow, his nose was aquiline and had clearly been broken more than once, and his dark chest hair poked out of the top of his shirt in quantities that I found repugnant.

Everything about him seemed brutish. Yet he spoke five languages, held two doctorates, and had homes all over the world. In late May of 2007, Patroclus and I found ourselves at one such home in Boulder, Colorado.

Patroclus, better at social situations and more polite than I could ever be, did most of the talking to Chiron after the town car had dropped us off from the airport. Our suitcases had been haphazardly tossed by me into the spare bedroom--one bed, full-sized, I noticed, as I tried to keep the delight out of my face--and Dr. Chiron made us something to eat in the kitchen. 

“So, Opus, then Los Angeles, now Boulder and then Ilion on the east coast? That’s quite a lot of change for a boy,” Dr. Chiron said to Patroclus, and it was clear to me that already Patroclus was his favorite. I was at once offended at the pitying tone he used--Patroclus could do a lot worse than being educated by the best schools money could buy--and pleased that someone else was also advocating for him.

I looked around the house--a relatively small cabin compared to the sprawling Californian mansions I was used to. The kitchen table where we sat was made from a huge geode slab affixed somehow to table legs, and constellations were painted all the way from the baseboards to the ceilings. Everything felt quite _lived in_ , from the worn-out Persian-style rugs to the bookshelves crowded with nonfiction paperbacks, trinkets, and vinyl records. 

The entire place smelled strongly of pine needles and patchouli and I guessed that it wouldn’t take much searching to find a dried-out joint hidden somewhere in all this eclectic clutter if I got bored enough.

Both Dr. Chiron and Patroclus were quiet and looking at me and I panicked for a split second, thinking I’d said that last thought out loud. 

“Well, what do you think?” Patroclus prompted, and I realized that they were waiting for the answer to some question I had not heard. Patroclus leaned in close to me, head tilted slightly, so close I could kiss him if I felt so inclined. And I felt very, very inclined. 

It occurred to me that I had been staring a beat too long, and like some strange compromise I made with myself, I licked his nose. It had been a miscalculation on my part, because though I had intended it to be playful, the salty taste of his skin, which at this point in my life I was unfamiliar with, made my skin prickle with a pleasure I had no idea what to do with. 

He blinked back at me, shocked before an affectionate smile broke over his face as he wiped where my tongue had touched with the back of his hand. “What was that?” 

I looked at Dr. Chiron, who, by appearances, knew exactly what that was. It was an extremely uncomfortable feeling, to be looked at like that. 

“I forgot to mention,” Dr. Chiron said carefully, “There’s only one extra bed at this place. If that makes you uncomfortable, one of you could sleep on the couch.” 

This was clearly aimed at Patroclus who had no idea it was aimed at him and who answered, “I don’t mind. Do you mind, Achilles?” 

“Not at all,” I said, meeting Dr. Chiron’s gaze.

** iii. **

A few weeks into our stay, Dr. Chiron brought us to three unused fire pits he’d dug.

“In my opinion, it takes more calories than it’s worth to start a fire from friction. You should always have three ways to start a fire on your person when you’re in the wilderness alone: matches, a lighter, and a magnesium bar. But there may come a time when you do not have those tools, and so you must learn how to start a fire the hard way. There are a few different methods you can use, but my favorite is the bow drill. I have prepared materials, and after you’ve mastered how to build a fire with the prepared materials, we are going to build a bow drill out of materials we found in the woods.” 

We watched Dr. Chiron, bulging muscles, fashion a bow out of a curved stick and nylon, and demonstrate how to make a fire out of it. His kindling lit with just a few minutes of work, though I did not miss the sheen of sweat over his brow. 

Patroclus, diligent and determined, worked on making his bow and, when he noticed I had not begun mine, assumed that I did not know where to start and helped me pick out wood and the correct stick to work with. In reality, I had been mesmerized by his lovely hands, watching his fingers as slender and graceful as a pianist’s, entranced as I saw the tendons move under the skin, the blue veins barely visible under his dark skin. I’d had the maddening urge to stop his work and bring the back of his hand up to my cheek. 

“It’s said that this method was first used in Neolithic Pakistan,” Dr. Chiron said. His voice broke me out of my trance, and I blushed as I began the work of creating friction with the bow and a stick. The coloring of my cheeks could easily be attributed to exercise. 

We were thirteen, with muscles far less developed than Dr. Chiron’s, and so the work was hard and took a long time. Patroclus was working more seriously than I was and so, despite the fact that I had better physical aptitude, his kindling lit before mine. Jealous, I nearly stood up and stomped his fire out before I saw the unabashed joy on his face. He threw himself on top of me, limbs hooking around my midsection, holding me and rolling in the dirt with glee. I smelled his sweat and felt the heat of his body warmer than the sun. His display of joy, innocent though it was, had me feeling anything but. I wanted to run my hands over his skin, or lick him again, or still him as he half-hugged, half-wrestled me, and cling to him as tight as I could. 

Dr. Chiron chuckled. “I sincerely hope that in a true survival situation, you won’t hug your friend as soon as you accomplish a task. Your fire went out, Patroclus.” 

This made Patroclus pull back, sheepish, and timidly apologize. How could he not be anyone’s favorite? I could not begrudge Dr. Chiron for liking him more anymore than I could begrudge Patroclus for being more likable. Patroclus was my favorite, too, after all.

** iv. **

Before the search party found his body, three days after he’d gone missing, I had been telling myself—nonsensically—that he’d just gotten lost. We liked to go exploring in the wilderness behind the school, and he had more than adequate survival skills thanks to that first summer we spent with Dr. Chiron. Cold though it was in the waning winter, there were burdocks in the woods he could dig up the root of and eat if the ground was warm enough and snow in the shade he could melt for fresh water.

Patroclus had excelled at all things wilderness. He was better than me, and those woods weren’t particularly daunting, even, in my more delirious states, when I’d considered running through the trees screaming his name and tearing bushes out of the half-frozen ground. 

By the time they found him, I thought, he’d be homesteading somewhere. He’d have gained five pounds, eating trout and fucking burdock, with an impressive lean-to shelter just behind him. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to worry anyone,” he’d say sheepishly, brushing off his pants, standing up. 

But I knew he was dead in my heart of hearts. Because the truth was that Patroclus was very, very good at wilderness survival, and we knew those woods like the back of our hands and couldn’t possibly get lost, and the only reason he hadn’t found his way home was that something very, very bad had happened to him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the kind comments. Sorry about the wait.

** i. **

I had not eaten. I had not slept. I barely left the woods on Friday and Saturday. When I’m feeling masochistic, I’ll think of the times I almost found him—I believe I walked by the spot he fell from twice, not thinking he could get so close to the edge of the ravine when the trail was a full five feet away from it—and I’ll go into a tailspin of whats ifs and if onlys and fucking wherefores until I’m crying. I hit things in the room until my knuckles are swollen; I shriek until my throat hurts. I pace around all night until my legs are stiff and then I pace some more after the sun rises and I should have gone to class. 

What if I’d heard his alarm go off in the morning? If I’d opened my eyes to watch him in the azure predawn light as he mechanically dressed and grabbed his wrist. Pulled him back into the warmth of the sheets. 

“Let’s skip today,” I’d have said, hearing the airy quality my voice takes on when I’ve just woken up. 

“I was going to let you, anyway,” he might have said back, his own voice rough with sleep. 

“I can think of something better we could do,” I would answer as his hips met mine, as my mouth dragged along his temple, his cheekbone, traveling down to meet his lips. It would have been tender and lazy until it wasn’t, until we reached that cusp everyone reaches when they’re no longer sweet with their lover, when teeth are bared and jaws are clenched and eye roll back. 

It was Saturday afternoon, the search party thinning out and the temperature dropping, when a teacher pulled me away for a moment. The past few days had been a blur; I could barely recall how I’d gotten to where I was standing or where I’d been just minutes before. It was not unlike trying to remember a night of drinking until you are blackout drunk. That is, you remember bursts and flashes here and there, lucidness teasing at the corners of your brain, until it’s all gone and BAM! you wake up the next morning, somehow in your bed, with a couple of bruises and a terrible headache to show for it. I say this now that my drinking has really picked up. Before Patroclus died, I’d only indulged in happy drinking, and certainly not to the point of memory loss--an occasional weekend indulgence where a few beers had me rosy-cheeked, pliantly and generously kissing Patroclus when we’d return to our dorm, silly and giddy.

The teacher grasped my shoulders and said something to me, words I understood individually but could not make sense of when put together in a sentence. He pressed my forehead with the back of his hand as I stood there solemnly, still trying to work out what the fuck he was trying to tell me, and then there was another teacher by my side, and they both guided me toward the trailhead. 

My mother was waiting there, looking so out of place that I briefly believed I was hallucinating. She stood carefully in the shade where the ground was still frozen and her Louboutins would not sink into the mud. She was displeased at my bedraggled state, I could tell--she said something accusatory to the teachers and licked her thumb to wipe away a smudge of dirt on my cheek, a gesture so maternal that it was alien coming from her, and led me to an illegally parked black Lamborghini. 

I wasn’t sure how to protest. Impotently, I said, “I wanted to stay and keep looking for Patroclus,” a statement which the adults either did not hear or pretended not to hear. All of this--the teachers opening the car’s door and buckling me in like a toddler, my mother slouching into the driver’s seat, pulling a cigarette from her pack of Gauloises with her teeth, a task she made look dignified and elegant as she talked at me--seemed to be happening to someone else and at a great distance. I felt as though I could do nothing, control nothing, like I’d left my agency and free will somewhere else and whoever managed to grab me could ferry me around wherever they pleased. 

I leaned my head against the tinted window of the passenger seat and wished, desperately, that I could wake up from this nightmare. 

“Would you believe they didn’t bother even _calling_ me until today? I realize I’m not your legal guardian, but for fuck’s sake! And when was the last time you ate something? Jesus Christ.” She dug around in her purse, the car swerving as she did, until she pulled out an orange pill bottle and handed it to me. I read the label without comprehending: OXYCODONE 20 Mg. “And where the hell is your coat? They just let you traipse around in only a sweater? No wonder they lost an entire child, with how attentive they appear to be.” 

Obediently, I dry-swallowed two of the pills, wincing as they slid down my throat, and tuned out my mother’s continuing grievances as the sun set and my belly began feeling warm from the narcotics. 

It would be another fifteen hours until they found him.

** ii. **

By the end of our first summer with Dr. Chiron, Patroclus and I could fashion knives out of rocks, could identify which plants could be used medicinally and which could be eaten, could make fishing poles out of sticks and traps for small animals. We could find water where there seemingly was none and make a shelter out of virtually nothing. We could grab an inhospitable world by its edges and forcibly mold it into something kind. 

Daily, we would run through the dry summer meadows of the Rocky Mountains, the tall, sweet-smelling grass making our legs itch. Our bodies were stronger than they’d ever been thanks to the exercise regime Dr. Chiron had us on, and our muscles strained pleasantly as we pushed ourselves, until finally, we would collapse on beds of wildflowers--Indian paintbrushes, columbines, bluebells, and fireweed all jewel-colored, complementing the cool undertones of Patroclus’s lovely skin. His curls would tangle in the blooms, pulling petals with him when he lifted his hair, which, coupled with the fact that the entire palette of the mountains suited him so well, made him look like some kind of forest nymph birthed from the cliffsides, and I would thank God that I was too tan at this point in the season for my blush to show as I swept the detritus out of his hair with my fingers, trying not to linger, trying to make the intimacy of the action seem casual when it was anything but. 

We were like gods in this realm, so sure we were of ourselves and our abilities. We did not believe we could get hurt in any serious way. I realize now that this childish thought--that we were invincible--never truly left me until it was proven patently false.

** iii. **

Dr. Chiron and my father butted heads. This was not something I was meant to know, at least on Dr. Chiron’s side, who had the good sense not to involve children in adult disputes. My father did not share Dr. Chiron’s sense of propriety, however, and called me whenever he would have particularly heated exchanges with my teacher. 

“Do you know just how much fucking money it costs for two boys to go to Ilion?” my father asked when I answered my cell phone. I hadn’t spoken to him much since arriving in Boulder, and I’d come to realize that I didn’t miss him in the slightest.

“Yes, it’s $55,000 a year. You told me,” I said, walking outside so as to spare Patroclus from accidentally overhearing the conversation and feeling like a burden, as I often suspected he did. 

“That’s just tuition, kid. That doesn’t include room and board, uniforms, or school fees. I’m shelling out a lot for you, and I don’t mind it! But it’s kind of ridiculous for little American Psycho, y’know?” 

“Patroclus?” I asked, deeply confused. 

“Yeah, because he killed that kid. You know about this. I told you. Hang on, kiddo--” He most certainly had not told me, and as my shock took form, I heard the distinct sound of glasses clinking and my father’s muffled voice ordering a Manhattan. “ _Anyway_ , Dr. Chiron offered to pay for his expenses. Offered isn’t the right word. He did it, straight up, contacted the school and settled up with them for all five fucking years, after I complained about the cost in passing. You know what a cheap asshole that makes me look like?” 

His voice, made tinny and shrill over the connection, caused me to wince. I was still trying to process the first part of what he’d said, and hardly realized what I was saying when I stupidly answered, “A big, cheap asshole?” 

When I hung up and returned to the house, I watched Patroclus carefully as he helped Dr. Chiron prepare dinner. Pieces of his personality--how furtive he was, how gentle, that thousand-yard stare, that anger he had when I first met him--took on new meaning. He was so sweet back then, just beginning to accept the love that both Dr. Chiron and I offered him, and I couldn’t shake the image of something happening quite by accident: two kids playing with matches or roughhousing a little too hard. Patroclus knelt over the body of another boy, oscillating between denial-- _No, this can’t be happening. No, you’re alright_ \--and bargaining-- _Please, let it be me instead_ \--until an adult finally stumbled upon the scene. I decided right then and there that I didn’t care if it was true that he’d killed a boy. And though I knew there was no way he did it on purpose, he could have killed dozens of boys, done it in cold blood, and I would still have loved him. Hell, I’d help just to be near him.

** iv. **

In retrospect, it is frankly amazing to me that no one seemed to outwardly suspect the true nature of my relationship with Patroclus, especially given the fact that we’d been caught in the act--or very near it--more than once. Most recently, during the fall semester of our senior year, one Hector Priam had walked in on us in a rather compromising position in the locker room, long after we’d thought everyone had gone home. I had been on my knees directly in front of Patroclus with his hand on the back of my head, fingers curled almost painfully around my hair, dragging me forward. There was no mistaking what was going on. 

Patroclus had curled in on himself, pulling his pants up quickly and guiltily, but I didn’t feel any shame and met Hector’s gaze without a problem. 

“So this is what you boys get up to?” he drawled in that southern accent that people found so charming. The disgust, which seemed to be more aimed at me as the cocksucker versus Patroclus, who’d merely had his cock sucked, was plain on his face. 

I wiped my mouth defiantly with the back of my hand, rising to my feet in no particular hurry, and said, “Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone.” 

I said this really only because the Priams were all Jesus Freaks, coming from a family that didn’t believe in birth control or premarital sex or skipping church and thought that it was God’s will (and not the fact that their ancestors had made their fortune on the backs of slaves) that had given them so much money, and I found Christians--or zealots of any persuasion, really--to be ridiculous. But Hector went white as a sheet and I realized that I had hit on something quite without meaning to. 

“Alright. What you do is between you and God. And what my brother does is between him and God,” he said guilelessly, like _we_ were doing _him_ a favor, and turned right around and walked out. 

“Oh, Jesus,” Patroclus had breathed after he left. 

“What do you think that was about?” I asked, both interested and mystified. 

“Who the fuck cares? That was brutal,” he answered, mortified, rubbing his temples with his fingertips. I could tell he was spiraling, thinking of all the ways this could get out and ruin our lives. I did not much mind who knew, but it occurred to me that the administration likely wouldn’t let us room together if they knew the goings-on of said room. 

“I’ll take care of it,” I told him, and I had.

** v. **

Ilion Academy was a sprawling campus with red brick buildings primarily in the Federal style. The dorms were on the far west side of the campus and backed up to a mountain--“It’s a _hill_ , Patroclus,” I’d said petulantly as his wide eyes took in the slope, recalling the Christmases I’d spent in Aspen with my father, as if Patroclus had not spent just spent the summer with me at the foot of those same mountains--and the classrooms were on the eastern side. 

Dr. Chiron had accompanied us to the school to help us get settled, something that garnered more attention than I’d expected. My father being who he was, Dr. Chiron’s status as a minor celebrity didn’t really register to me as significant in any way. Students--mostly boys, although some girls came through. Once an all-boys school, Ilion had opened its doors to girls in the 1980s, though boys remained the majority of the student body. This, I’m told, made getting a girlfriend a difficult task, a fact that did not bother me in the slightest--dropped by the dorm, some standing diffidently in the doorway, others striding in confidently with a copy of one of his books to ask for a signature. 

I found this all very irritating, especially since my father from a very young age had instilled in me the idea that asking a famous person for their autograph or a picture with them was rude. Dr. Chiron was more gracious than my father, however, and listened to every starstruck kid who wandered through. 

“You’re generous with your time,” I said, hanging sweaters up in the wardrobe. This was something I’d heard my father say to other actors who deigned to pose for pictures on the street. 

Patroclus, not catching my meaning, said, “Yes, thank you for flying all the way out here to help us.”

** vi. **

I wonder if anyone would believe me if I said that I think this is how I was always meant to feel. When I finally arrived at it, this rage--after a cold, creeping dread settled in my belly, after the denial, the nausea, the period where I was stupid with grief--I felt like I had arrived at my true self. There is nothing as comfortable or intoxicating as surrendering yourself to a force that you’d fought your whole life. I don’t think of myself anymore as a person. I think my heart stopped pumping blood when his did. I think if they cut me open, they’d find either golden ichor or cancerous rot. My soul is gone and all that is left for me to do is kill and die. I am excited to do both. 

I was conceived violently, born violently (who among us is not?), and it only makes sense that it should end violently.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, sorry about the late update. Thank you all for reading thus far <3

** i. **

I do not remember Patroclus’s body being found. This, according to the therapist they make me see twice a week, is normal. She tries to figure out where I go when I disassociate--that’s what she calls it when I don’t remember things, or when I’m so filled with rage that I’m seeing myself from outside my own body--and she thinks I have a personality disorder but can’t quite decide between the three she’s narrowed it down to.

The therapist--matronly, smelling of mothballs and an old-ladyish peony perfume and always dressed in soft pastels which, for whatever reason, invoke my ire--goes through checklists (state-issued, I’m assuming) and has me reassure her biweekly that I’m not going to kill myself. As if I would tell her in the first place and give her any of these other frumpy fucking idiots a chance to stop me. On that subject, I’d done my research: I could only be institutionalized on grounds of being a danger to myself if I’d shown that I had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit suicide. This struck me as quite stupid; animals have starved themselves at the zoo, and surely I had more resources than a trapped tiger. So as long as I do not tell my therapist anything alarming, like how I’ve been stockpiling my mother’s pills or that I crossed state lines to buy a rather large switchblade or how I’ve been friendly with the president of Ilion’s hunt club just so I can steal one of his guns if need be, I am pretty much in the clear. 

Anyway, though I can’t recall Patroclus’s body being found, I know the progression of events: Antilochus, at six in the morning, had called me saying that he could see some commotion from his dorm window. I know my mother had driven me from her hotel where I’d spent the night in a sweaty, drug-induced sleep. I know I saw the coroner van and Patroclus covered in a white sheet on a stretcher, grabbed handfuls of mud, and pulled my hair out in tufts. 

I know these things happened because my mother told me and because there was evidence of it: dirt deep under my fingernails, caked in what was left of my hair, and (bizarrely) in between my teeth. 

I felt Patroclus’s absence raw in my heart and, when my ability to store memories came back to me, I was outside the morgue surrounded by adults--my shoulders ached, my throated burned, my head pounded, and I surmised that I’d been about to fight the pathologist with how frightened he looked--and a stoic, gloved nurse was squirting the air bubbles out of a syringe. And then things went black again as they sedated me.

** ii. **

“They wouldn’t let you see the body,” my mother had said matter-of-factly when I awoke in the hospital later. I wasn’t interested in hearing about it, and cut my eyes to the side, staring at the ugly blue linoleum.

I think my mother loves me more now that Patroclus is dead. Or rather, I think she loves me more now that I’ve lost my humanity. I know if I voiced this opinion to any normal adult in my life, they’d reassure me that I was only traumatized and grief-stricken and my mother loved me just the same as she always has. But that’s just not true. 

Now that Patroclus is gone, my mother has someone to commiserate with. We are both vengeful, angry creatures, tempered by circumstance to be as vicious as possible. She has, for months, been the only adult who believes me when I say that there’s no way Patroclus fell and the only person, adult or no, whom I have told that I will kill his murderer. She is what my therapist might call an enabler, if I actually told my therapist anything of substance rather than clench my jaw and reassure her that I’m not going to kill myself and that my grades are fine. 

My mother signed a short-term lease on a cottage 45-minutes away from Ilion the day after Patroclus had been found, bought me all new clothes including a Gucci camel hair coat that she had to send away for when I mentioned that my letterman jacket had gone missing, and (and this is just speculation) bribed the principal with either sex or money to let me graduate despite the fact that I didn’t attend a single class after Patroclus was found.

** iii. **

If you asked Agamemnon Atreus or any single boy at Ilion, Briseis Mynes was the hottest available girl at school. Helen, of course, was the hottest, but she was dating the younger Atreus brother (and, I had learned relatively recently, cheating on him with the younger Priam brother).

If you asked Patroclus, she was wonderful! and so funny! and so smart! and so kind!

People who admired her seemed to forget one key element about her: she was a fucking freak. Sure, she was lovely, appearance-wise. I could see the appeal of her aesthetically. But she wanted degrees in ecology and political economy. She was an anarchist, or a social libertarian, or _something_ weird, and she kept a ball python named Kurt Cobain and six milk snails in her dorm illegally. 

She listened to folk-punk, she watched indie movies, she did her makeup weird and dressed weird when she wasn’t in uniform and the worst part was that everyone was fucking enamored with her. She was from old money just like everyone else despite her apparent distaste for the bourgeoisie, and when I suggested politely during the language arts class we shared in the eighth grade that she go to a public school already and use her tuition money to build a hospital in some miserable rural corner of the world instead of parading her self-righteousness around in front of us, I earned her as a lifelong enemy. 

And I was fine with her hating me because I hated her right back. I hated how clearly she loved Patroclus. I hated how Patroclus loved her in return. I dreaded the day that the two of them got together and hated how people around me treated it as a foregone conclusion from the first moment they met when they were thirteen. 

“Briseis and Patroclus?” people would say. “The only people who don’t know they’re together is them.” 

It drove me fucking crazy. Why did it have to be such a certainty that they’d get together? Can’t a boy and a girl just be friends? Why did their friendship have to be poked at by everyone--wink wink, nudge nudge--sure they’ll be swapping bodily fluids by the time they’re seventeen? 

And if my jealousy was this bad at just the idea of them dating, it would be unbearable in reality. I could imagine it: me, brooding and uncommunicative. Patroclus, too wrapped up in the honeymoon stages of a relationship with Little Miss Environmentalism to even notice that I’d stopped speaking to him. And just like that--poof--he wouldn’t need me. Briseis had plenty of money, she’d take care of him just fine. Did he ever need me? Was I just a nuisance? 

So, after Briseis and Patroclus met that first week at Ilion and every asshole in the world had determined that they were destined for love, I decided that I would simply have to get to him first.

Since deciding to stake my claim, I had not been acting normal and I knew that Patroclus thought so but didn’t say anything, and that made me act even stranger. I would watch him intently, fascinated with the way he ate, with the way he washed his hands, with how he looked when he’d just woken up. I was obsessed with the way his hair curled, with the way his muscles pushed and pulled under his skin, with his teeth and his voice and his hips and his toes. 

Sometimes I would be angry at him. How could he sit there, right in front of me, and torture me like this? He sensed when I was angry and was always deeply apologetic, not sure what he’d done, trying to make things up to me. Gentle Patroclus. Sweet Patroclus. Doe-eyed, lovely, considerate. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to shove him around, wrestle him to the ground, drag my teeth along his chest, pull his hair, bruise his neck with my mouth. Not totally sure of the mechanics of sex yet, I wanted to thrust against him fully-clothed with his wrists pinned. I wanted to suck on his fingers; have them trigger my gag reflex. And at night, with him trustfully asleep in the twin bed just three feet away, I found my right hand wandering below my waistband as I watched his placid face.

Everyone around me seemed to be going through sexual awakenings far less complicated than mine: Odysseus had touched a boob, a fact he announced at lunch one day in December, and this was very big news to everyone in our friend group. People asked him all kinds of questions, most of which made my stomach turn. Fucking Odysseus, who had pockmarked skin and was short and bow-legged, was getting action with some fucking townie girl named Penelope, making everything sound so blissful and fun and painless. Meanwhile, I was sitting next to Patroclus at our lunch table, a frustrating tingle in my belly from being a fucking inch away from Pat’s thigh. 

I began to close the distance between us. I would bump his hip when we’d brush our teeth in the morning. I would run my fingers through his hair in a half-hearted ruffle if I passed him in the hallway. I would playfully wrestle him and let him win, taking almost obscene pleasure in the way he’d pin me. Once, inches from my face, he beamed and said, “I think you’re actually getting worse at this, Achilles.” I responded by bucking my hips to throw him off-balance and too-easily had him in a half nelson. I made many miscalculations in regards to my attraction to Patroclus, but this one was, by far, one of the most egregious. Firstly, I had been half-hard, and thrusting upwards made that obvious, and secondly, I’d displayed in three seconds flat that I had wanted to be held down. 

And yet I couldn’t fucking help myself as I lowered my mouth to the shell of his ear, close enough that my lips were touching it, and breathed, “Am I?”

** iv. **

Patroclus had been like an anchor to me. Without him, I was not human. I did not feel human at his memorial service. I felt ice in my veins as I watched Odysseus and Diomedes race across the quad. It seemed insane to me that these people were just...moving on; that people were going to continue their lives in a world without Patroclus.

Briseis was in our room when I returned--I kept saying _our_ even though it was just mine now--and I was almost pleased. I wanted to be good and mean to someone. I wanted to tear into her. I wanted her to kick my teeth in. I was ready, poised like a boxer about to enter the ring. 

“How did you get in here?” I asked. 

“Patroclus gave me a key,” she said, not even bothering to look at me, as she pulled a flannel out of his closet and smelled it. I had done the same thing the night before, and watching her do it made me feel almost bad for her. There was something of Patroclus that lived in the stitches; the almond oil he used on his knuckles when they got chapped in the wintertime, the Big Red gum he always chewed, the sweet musk under it that belonged only to him, had somehow soaked into all his clothing. 

I think I would have been hurt that he hadn’t told me he’d given a key to Briseis if I’d had enough time to think about it. Presently, though, she was folding up the flannel and going through his drawers. 

“You can’t just come into my room and riffle through my shit, Briseis. You’re not taking anything of his, either,” I said, leaning against the wall. I figured this was beyond reasonable as far as requests went, but I let her continue whatever it was she was doing. 

I think I’ve probably never looked or behaved more like my mother than at that moment. Sure, I could have told her to get the hell out, dragged her by the sleeve of that awful thrift store cardigan she was wearing, and thrown her into the hallway, but she was bound to find something that really hurt her if she kept looking.

And sure enough, she opened his bedside drawer and furrowed her brow at the plainly visible bottle of Astroglide there. 

“Didn’t know he was sexually active?” I asked casually. “I wonder, what would he think, seeing you violate his privacy like this?” 

In truth, he probably wouldn’t care. What secrets does a dead boy need to protect? 

“You knew it was in there, too,” she pointed out, crossing the room back to where I leaned against the wall. 

I rolled my eyes. “And why do you think that is, Briseis?” I saw her confidence falter for a split second. “Come on. I know you’re smart enough to figure it out.” 

I felt an awful smile split my face as I looked at Briseis. “Did you think you had him wrapped around your finger? Are you the type who likes the chase? Did you think that just because he never showed an interest in any of the other girls, that you could string him along? Who wouldn’t want Briseis? Lovely fuckin’ Briseis, on the precipice of an inevitable lesbian phase in whatever liberal arts college she goes to. Be honest. If you had dated, how long would it be before you read some feminist poetry and decided you outgrew him?” 

I didn’t know if a single thing I’d just said was true, but Briseis slapped me hard across the face. 

“You aren’t the only person who loved him,” she said. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. There was blood in the corner of my mouth, and I wiped it gingerly with the back of my hand. 

“I was the first to,” I said. 

“It isn’t a fucking competition!” she yelled, her small fists balled up and hitting me impotently on the chest. She had begun to sob. 

I had not said it to anyone else but my mother at this point, and I don’t know why I said it then. I had to tell someone who loved him, I think. “Patroclus didn’t slip.” 

Briseis froze, her fist stopped in midair. “What?” 

“I went to where they found his body. The trail is too far away from the ravine. There were footprints like--” 

“Like?” she asked, her voice small and deadly calm. 

“Like he’d begun slipping a few feet away from the fall. Like someone pushed him.” 

For once in my life, I was grateful for Briseis’s radical praxis. Anyone else would ask if I’d gone to the police, and I would have to explain that firstly I didn’t think some hick cop who barely graduated high school was going to reopen a case that had already been wrapped up nice and pretty, and secondly that I was going to find who did it and flay him alive anyway so the law did not much matter to me at this point. 

“Okay,” she said, wiping her tears. “Let’s find whoever pushed him.” 

And I realized at that moment that Briseis was not the enemy.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: Homophobia for this chapter. Also chapter this is not from Achilles' perspective.

** CHORUS. **

On Wednesday, February 8th, 2012, Hector Priam had his cousin buy him a bottle of Maker’s Mark and spent a miserable evening (luckily bundled in his ski gear) stumbling around the woods behind Ilion. He had gotten himself lost in his drunkenness and, giving up on finding his way to his dorm, finally slumped against a tree and slept for about an hour before the rising sun woke him. He glanced at the bottle in his hands. He was still drunk and unsure how much of the whiskey he’d drank and how much he had spilled the previous night. At any rate, he lifted the bottle, a third full, to his lips and took another pull.

Of all the things he regretted, he regretted walking in on Achilles Pelides sucking off that quiet kid the most. Here was the thing about Achilles: he was the fucking devil. He didn’t have any boundaries or morals. He didn’t have even a loose ideology to guide him. And, okay, sure, Hector _had_ planned on telling everyone, and he _had_ planned on getting that quiet kid beaten up at the very least. Obviously, fucking with the track and football star was unwise, even if he was a faggot. But what Hector hadn’t realized was that Achilles shouldn’t be fucked with because Achilles liked the taste of blood. 

The day after Hector had walked in on it, Achilles had silkily saddled up next to Hector in Latin. _Silkily_ was the only word to describe it. Now that Hector knew, it was all he could see. He wondered how no one else could see it. It was in everything Achilles did, the queerness. 

“You aren’t going to say anything,” Achilles said. It was not a question. 

“I’m not?” Hector asked. He had thought about it after he’d left the locker room, and Achilles hadn’t actually mentioned Paris in his threat. 

“It’s in your best interest,” Achilles confirmed. He looked at his nails like how a girl might after she’d gotten a manicure. Hector looked around the room. How was no one else seeing this? 

“I don’t do favors for queers,” Hector said, picking up his stuff with the intention of skipping class. He couldn’t stomach this conversation any longer. 

“Does the name Astyanax ring any bells?” Achilles asked, calm as can be. Hector froze. 

“How do you know that name?” he asked. His throat was suddenly very dry. 

“Well, you know, your girlfriend missed the entire spring semester last year.” 

“She was on a missionary trip with her parents,” Hector said. He’d told the lie so many times, it felt like the truth coming out of his mouth. 

“Yes. Odd that her parents would find a newborn child to adopt on their missionary trip. How much do you want to bet that Astyanax has your eyes?” The way he said it made Hector realized with some alarm that Achilles was enjoying this. 

“So that’s it?” Hector asked, ready to concede. “A Mexican standoff?” 

“If I only had one gun pointed at you, it would be,” Achilles said. The corner of his mouth twitched; he was fighting a smile. He pulled a piece of folded loose-leaf from his pocket and set it down on the table in front of them. “I hope you don’t ever plan on running for office.” 

Hector did not open the paper. He could guess what might be on it: Paris and Helen, maybe, or the time his mother got drunk and violent and committed second-degree assault, or how his father bribed the judge to let it slide, or his sister Cassandra, who his father had had institutionalized. 

“You win,” Hector said. 

But Achilles was sadistic. It was like this had become a fun hobby for him, reminding Hector of how deeply fucked he was if he even so much as looked at Achilles wrong. Achilles might wink at him menacingly, as they passed each other in the hall, or nod at him in a way that would send a chill up Hector’s spine. 

It was only a week after Achilles threatened him that it sunk in that Achilles was completely batshit fucking crazy. He was like a rabid dog, foaming at the mouth, chomping at anything that came near him. The only time he behaved himself was when the quiet kid was around, and even then, he’d sometimes act up.

During football season (Hector hated that he had to _change_ in front of the faggot), Hector did his level best to fuck with Achilles, even when it had meant sacrificing a win. On one such occasion, Achilles had approached him, snarling, “You trying to get on my bad side, Priam?” 

“Careful,” Hector said, jutting his chin toward the bleachers. “Your girlfriend’s here.” 

Achilles smiled in a way that raised gooseflesh on Hector’s arms and said, “I’m the girlfriend.” 

It had been so revolting that before he knew what he was doing, Hector had hit him. And by the looks of it, Achilles enjoyed it. He started to laugh as he returned a punch, ducking the next one that came his way. 

“You’re fucking crazy,” was all Hector could say. The next thing he knew, he was on his back, staring at the stars, getting completely wailed on by, of all people, a little fucking faggot. 

“You fucking bet I am,” Achilles said in his ear before five teammates managed to hold Achilles back. 

Both Achilles and Hector, being star athletes, were punished with just a slap on the wrist. Hector, the one who started it, had two detentions and Achilles had only one. If only those teachers knew what a menace Achilles really was. 

Hector, taking another unsteady drink, reflected on this, on what a better world it would be were Achilles to just fucking die already, when God delivered him the opportunity for just such a thing to happen. It had to be God; there was no other explanation. His back was turned to Hector, but Achilles, wearing his letterman jacket with “PELIDES,” sewed on the back, stood by the side of the trail. He had a hoodie on under the letterman, which (blessedly) impaired his peripheral vision. He must have had headphones on, because he did not hear Hector, who was not particularly light of foot even sober, sneaking up behind him and, with one decisive shove, Hector threw him down the ravine. 

Except. 

The face that looked up at him in terror, when it was too late to take it back, was not the face belonging to Achilles. It was the quiet kid. The moment the two looked at each other felt like it stretched on for hours: confusion and horror mirrored in their expressions. And then it was over. The way the kid landed was grotesque. Hector was sure he’d heard bones breaking. He felt his heart in his throat as he slid down the embankment as carefully as he could. The kid was either dead or unconscious, Hector could not tell, and his drunken logic dictated that he needed to take the letterman. If the kid was found wearing the letterman, people might assume that Achilles was the true target. Right? 

So he stripped it off of the kid’s limp body and folded it close to himself. There was blood on the sleeve, he noticed with mild disgust. He was sober enough now to make it back to his dorm, and so he did, and shoved the letterman into the back of his wardrobe. He collapsed on the bed and slept very well, all things considered.


	6. Chapter 6

** i. **

They gave me a paper bag labeled “PERSONAL EFFECTS” which contained just his iPod and headphones. The iPod had been mine in sixth grade; I’d gotten it in my stocking at Christmas and used it for about six weeks before shoving it in a desk drawer and forgetting about it until Patroclus entered my life and I’d given it to him, along with whatever accessories it had come with. It had been crazy to me that he still used the thing, given that they came out with a new one every three hours and I was more than happy to buy him anything he wanted. Moreover, he took care of the 5-year-old thing despite its cracked screen and limited memory.

I knew what Patroclus listened to--it was all sad white guys with acoustic guitars and weak voices. He’d always have it on loud in the morning as we got ready for class: Conor Oberst, Elliott Smith, Sufjan Stevens. And those are just the ones I can name. I can’t tell you how many shower blowjobs I gave accompanied by the fucking _Cassadega_ album by Bright Eyes just because Patroclus liked that shit--and yet I still charged the iPod when I got back to my dorm and scrolled through his playlists like they might contain some secret to his death that I was overlooking.

** ii. **

Chiron had offered to let us stay at his apartment in Greenwich for the summer before our ninth year, though he was currently promoting a new book and would be gone most of the time. It was just as well that he had offered because I didn’t want to return to California and all the jabs about being from Los Angeles had started to bruise my ego. On the east coast, being from anywhere but the east coast was an unspeakable crime. From the way Odysseus or Diomedes talked, you’d think I had surfed into math class wearing a fucking puka shell necklace while smoking a blunt.

I liked New York City; I’d been there before with my dad to shoot a movie, but wandering around alone with Patroclus and without handlers was another matter. Part of the charm, for me, was in how truly disgusting the city was: the stench of urine wafting up from the greasy, gum-coated sidewalks, cement trapping the heat to make the subways completely sweltering, rats the size of puppies scampering along the train tracks.

On our first day there, I dragged Patroclus through the Met, more interested in the suits of armor and swords than the Van Goghs and Monets that he wanted to see (though I conceded after a golden helmet in the shape of a lion put me in such a good mood and I let Patroclus be the one to drag me around for a time). 

We ordered ice cream cones from a truck in the park meant to bleed money from tourists. My mother lived nearby, on the Upper West Side, and though it was technically illegal for her to see me without supervision, she showed up, shepherded us through Central Park, and very indulgently bought us burgers at the Shake Shack on Columbus Ave. Well, it was indulgent to me. She brushed the hair out of my face, smiled at me lovingly, and essentially pretended that Patroclus wasn’t there.

** iii. **

I was still being weird around Patroclus. I’d been weird since September and here it was fucking July. It’d been nearly a year of his doleful eyes silently apologizing for whatever it was that had made me mad. A year of abject joy--mine by losing self-control and touching him, or being tender, and his by being touched and receiving this tenderness. And then I’d get angry again, because when I’d leaned my head on his shoulder during movie night in the common room, I would wonder why he had not stroked my hair or kissed my temple. Because we were two boys, that’s why, and I wasn’t Briseis, and friends leaned their heads against other friends, didn’t they? So why would he think it was romantic?

And I’d lie to myself. Achilles, isn’t it better to be friends? Closer than friends--two boys sharing one soul, finishing one another’s sentences, falling asleep and waking up in one another’s company? Girlfriends get felt up in broom closets, start fights over text messages, tell you off for forgetting entirely arbitrary shit like your two-week “anniversary.” So being a friend was better. It didn’t feel better. Why didn’t it feel better? 

Touching him felt like putting my hand on a hot stove and leaving it there. Touching him felt like a sacrament. Touching him excited me, gutted me, and healed me all at once. 

I was agitated to the point of breaking. I was brooding, sulking around Chiron’s beautiful two-bedroom when I could get away with it. 

Presently, Patroclus and I were having breakfast, some kind of organic yogurt made by Chiron’s friends at a creamery somewhere. Chiron had left fifteen minutes before to meet with his publisher and I had checked out long before that. Agony. It was agony to watch him put little slices of strawberries in his bowl, to watch him take a sip of coffee (he had just started drinking it black), to see his broad chest getting broader by the day under his heather-gray pajama shirt. 

Suddenly there was something wet and sticky on my chest. I looked down incredulously. Patroclus had lobbed a spoonful of yogurt across the table which had landed right over my heart. 

“What,” I said in complete disbelief, “the fuck?” 

Patroclus was positively gleeful. “Finally something got your attention.” 

I arched an eyebrow dangerously, feeling a mischievous smile dancing at the corners of my mouth. Patroclus visibly shrank away from me. “Don’t,” he said. 

Quicker than he could dodge it, I flicked a spoonful back, aiming for his face. The _splat_ was oddly satisfying. 

“You’re such a dick,” Patroclus said, but he was laughing. “I think you need some toppings.” 

He tossed a clump of granola at me, where it landed in the blob of yogurt, sticking there. 

“You’re fucking dead,” I said very seriously, practically lept out of the chair and over the table, completely reckless. He fell out of his chair and I crawled towards him on all fours like a predator as he scooted inefficiently backward. “Give me a hug, Patroclus.” 

“No!” Patroclus laughed, his hands wildly grabbing for anything on the table to use as a weapon against me. He knocked over a bowl of blueberries, which went flying all over the breakfast nook. 

“Why don’t you want a hug? Is there something wrong?” I said innocently. 

Patroclus seemed to realize that staying remotely clean was, at this point, a losing game, and instead of fleeing, he went on the offensive and launched himself at me. Tumbling across the living room, we wrestled in the familiar way we always did until Patroclus bent his head forward to wipe yogurt from his face onto my shirt and, in retaliation, I took the thing off in one quick move with the intention of making him as sticky as possible with the yogurt he’d thrown at me in the first place. And then I felt his erection against my hip. 

And then I felt his mouth against mine.

** iv. **

Our friend Automedon, at Ilion on scholarship, lived in Inwood, so once a week we took the A Train up to Dyckman Street, walked a couple of blocks, buzzed ourselves in, and crowded into his family’s tiny apartment in some Art Deco building next to a Dominican grocery store.

And, though Automedon’s family had two cats (I despise the things), and the apartment was cramped and had no air conditioning, Patroclus was happy to be there, and I was happy when Patroclus was happy. I didn’t mind the 45-minute subway ride, because Patroclus held my hand during. How could I mind anything, when Patroclus was there, ready to push me into an alleyway at any moment and kiss me into dizziness? 

And, as it turns out, Automedon’s loyalty is unflinching, even now that Patroclus is gone.

** v. **

Scamander is some State-college fucking linebacker who sells shitty coke cut with creatine and makes weird comments to underage girls when they buy from him. It doesn’t matter to me what a fucking scumbag he is, but ever since I called him a scumbag to his face my junior year, it’s been pretty much on-sight between us.

Here’s the thing: before Patroclus died, I’d been worried, in the few fights I got in, that I might get hurt. Patroclus fussing over my injuries, his brow creased, shaking his head disappointedly, was not something I enjoyed. Now that there was no Patroclus to look over my swollen knuckles, to tsk-tsk over bruises and scrapes, I pull no fucking punches. 

And so, today, when Scamander approaches me at 10:00 pm in the parking lot between a McDonald’s and a Target and cracks a joke about how my boyfriend--he does not know this is true, he’s just trying to be homophobic--had to throw himself off a cliff to get away from me, I crack my knuckles in absolute fucking delight. 

I’ve been in therapy for two and a half months and not a single session with that peony-scented hag has given me the kind of catharsis that bathing in some low-level scumfuck’s blood has. Scamander looks, rather instantaneously, like he realizes he’s made a grave mistake. The combination of striking a nerve and the fact that I’ve been holding back all those other times we’ve come to blows add up to me tearing him completely apart. 

I’m blissed out, lost in my art, with thick, warm blood splattering comfortingly on my face, when finally I am dragged away. 

“Jesus, you were gonna fucking kill him, Pelides,” says a familiar, irritating voice. I wipe blood out of my eyes. I blink. It’s Odysseus speaking to me. Diomedes is next to him, glaring, clearly annoyed with me for ruining his night by having to break up a fight. Well, I mean, they didn’t have to. They could have let me kill him. Automedon is standing a little further off. He raises his hand as if to touch me and then thinks better of it. 

“Come on, let’s go to my dorm and get you changed,” Auto says quietly. “Fewer people will see than if we go to yours.” 

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” I ask, and then look down to see my white T-shirt torn nearly in half and soaked in Scamander’s blood. It strikes me as deeply funny that I had not realized this before, and I burst out laughing. 

The three boys in front of me glance at each other nervously. This has been happening more and more often: they treat me like a pipe bomb that might go off with just the slightest of mishandling. 

“Someone probably called the cops,” Diomedes says, scratching at his stubble. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” 

That seems to be the push Automedon needs. He reaches out again, then looks at my wrecked shirt and shakes his head. “I’m driving,” he says. Then he does something dangerous. He reaches into my pants pocket and grabs my keys. Diomedes and Odysseus watch him like he just poked a bear with a stick. “See you guys later,” he says to them. 

If Patroclus were here, I’d feel bad. Automedon, looking very tired, unlocks my car. But Patroclus is not here, and I wish people would stop fucking pulling me away from my fights, and I wish I could just find the person who pushed him and end my suffering once and for all. 

“Hector doesn’t like me,” I say as a slide into the passenger’s seat. 

Automedon had the bad luck of getting Hector, a sanctimonious prick, assigned to him as a roommate this year and not enough money to bribe the people in the administration office to reassign him, which was how I got paired with Patroclus for five years straight. 

“He’s always with his girlfriend on the weekends,” Auto says. A beat. “Also if you chose where to go based on who there hates you, you’d be a fucking hermit.” 

This makes me laugh. The adrenaline has worn off a little, and I realize my hands are trembling a little and starting to ache. The town falls away and the road stretches out ahead of us as we head back to Ilion.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tend to dislike posting chapters under 2,000 words, but I felt like this was necessary in the whole "building dread" department. 
> 
> Thank you all for reading so far. We're almost there.

** CHORUS. **

On Thursday, February 9th, Patroclus rose, as he often did, before dawn. He uncurled himself from Achilles, who had had conditioning for his final season of track during his high school career the previous afternoon, and so Patroclus did not wake him. His jacket was still wet from the sleet that had come down the evening before as he walked to the dining hall and so, without much thought, he’d slipped on a hoodie and then Achilles’s letterman over it. 

He had headphones plugged into an iPod Nano (4th generation, previously belonging to Achilles), and pulled the hood up and over his head to shield him from the morning cold. 

Before he left, he adjusted the blankets to cover Achilles where they had shifted and kissed his cheek. He almost said, “I love you,” but was afraid that his rough voice would wake Achilles. And anyway, Achilles knew well enough.

** i. **

Automedon keeps his half of the dorm meticulously clean. I don’t blame him; he was the oldest of four living in a two-bedroom apartment before he came to Ilion. If I came from some cramped Inwood hovel, reeking of cat piss and baby shit, with fucking merengue music filtering through the barred windows at all hours, I’d keep my room in spartan condition as well. 

Absurdly, Automedon looks through his own wardrobe for something to dress me in. Most of what he owns used to be mine before I outgrew it and Patroclus had facilitated an elaborate clothing exchange in which he could give Automedon some decent things to wear without embarrassing him. Whatever he finds in there would be at least two sizes too small. 

“Auto, man, no offense but I’m just going to steal one of Hector’s shirts,” I say before he can unfold anything. 

Automedon shrugs. “It’s not like he’ll notice.” 

First, I pull out the storage drawer under Hector’s bed. Unlike Automedon, Hector is a fucking slob. The drawer (bafflingly) contains some loose Pringles and a couple of crusty socks. 

Not particularly squeamish, I pick up one of the socks. “I found Hector’s second girlfriend.”

“You found wha--” Automedon starts before the sock hits him square on the forehead. He blinks before reality hits him and he gags. “That’s so fucking disgusting! I can’t believe you touched that, you asshole!” 

This is the most delighted I’ve been in a while, and I cackle. Automedon rushes to the ensuite, and I hear the sink going. At an angle, I can see Automedon’s reflection bowed over the faucet, scrubbing his face with soap. 

There’s still half a smirk on my face when I open up Hector’s wardrobe to find a shirt.


End file.
